How DHSea Score works
Back to DHSea Score · Last updated October 16, 2026
DHSea Score reads one public page once, from our server, and runs fixed rules on the page source and response headers. Nothing here is a survey of real visitors, a security audit, or a promise about search ranking.
The A-F grade
51 checks in five categories: Security (27% of the grade), SEO (26%), Accessibility, static checks only (22%), Best practices (15%) and Speed, using server-side proxies only (10%). Each check passes, fails or cannot be measured; unmeasured checks are left out and the report says how many were counted. High-severity checks count more than low ones. The grade is not comparable to Lighthouse.
Delight signals (estimate)
What it is: a 0-100 heuristic for how warm and inviting a page's wording and visuals read, worked out from the first page load. What it is not: a measurement of anyone's emotions, a prediction of conversions, or part of the A-F grade. A friendly-sounding page can still be hard to use, and a plain, serious page can be exactly right for its audience.
| Signal | Points | What we look at |
|---|---|---|
| Speaks to you directly | 20 | How often the text addresses the reader (you, we, let's) and uses contractions |
| Positive wording | 25 | Positive versus negative words from a fixed English word list; text with neither scores at the midpoint |
| Friendly microcopy | 10 | Welcoming phrases such as welcome, thanks, please, let's (up to three kinds) |
| Easy to read | 10 | Flesch reading ease of the visible text: plain sentences score higher |
| Visual care | 15 | Five yes/no signals: images with alt text, a graphic (SVG, picture, canvas or video), a share image, a theme color, and a few emoji (1 to 12) |
| Low friction | 20 | Starts at full points; loses points for popup or overlay markers, many third-party script hosts, ALL-CAPS text, heavy exclamation marks, autoplaying media and marquee or blink elements |
Bands: Cold (0-29), Neutral (30-54), Warm (55-74), Joyful (75-100). Pages with fewer than 40 readable words show "n/a" instead of a made-up number.
What it cannot see
- External stylesheets, fonts, color, layout, motion, sound and anything built by JavaScript after load.
- Languages other than English: the word lists are English only, so other languages are likely to read as neutral.
- Irony, context and audience. A legal notice full of the word "warning" is doing its job, and the estimate will still call it cold.
- Wording that merely sounds friendly. Hostile text that happens to say "you" earns voice points, which is a known weakness of this kind of heuristic.
How we check that it works
The signals are tested against sample pages written to be playful, ordinary, bland and hostile, and the estimate must rank them in that order with clear gaps. That shows the signals move in the intended direction. It does not show that the number matches what real people feel, which is why each estimate has a "Does this match how the page feels to you?" button. Your answer is sent as a score and band only; no page address and no IP address is stored with it.
Saved reports
Signed-in, email-confirmed accounts keep their last 20 reports, including each check's result, so you can reopen or download them later without using a grade. Anyone can download the report on screen as a JSON file. See the Privacy Policy.